One student wins a right to say silly things about a powerful man. Couldn't we extend this liberty to all our children?

The Emma Sullivan story has for the moment reached a happy place: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback Monday apologized to the teenager his staff had tried to bully into an apology of her own, which she refused.

This sorry episode presents us yet again with the spectacle of an American child forced to grow up overnight because adults around her insist on
acting like children.

Emma is from Prairie Village, Kansas, and a senior at Shawnie Mission East High School. As part of a Youth in Government program, Emma traveled to
Topeka, where she had to listen to a speech by Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, a right-wing ideologue who, Kansans like to joke, is transforming
their state into "Brownbackistan." What Emma knew about Brownback was that he had vetoed funding for the arts, leaving Kansas as the sole state
without a state arts program. Emma Sullivan tweeted the following subversive thought: "Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he
sucked, in person #heblowsalot."

But in the holy commonwealth of Kansas, no sparrow shall fall without the notice of state-paid social-media watchdogs. Brownback's staff sniffed
out this verbal terrorism, and called her principal, who cravenly called her in and tried to bully her into writing an apology. Emma refused, and
her story swept the Web like a fire off the Kansas prairie. Official humorlessness and hypocrisy had transformed an American teenager (an earlier
tweet: "Dear edward and jacob, this is the best night of my life. I want u. Love, ur future wife #breakingdawn") into a global symbol of protest.

In response, the Governor brownbacked down: "My staff over-reacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize. Freedom of speech is among our most
treasured freedoms."

Both of Emma's tweets are silly. (Among other things, Emma actually hadn't told the Governor he sucked, alas.) But so what? Teen-agers are supposed to be silly. It is adults who should be mature. Surrounded by full-grown ninnyhammers, Emma has had to grow up overnight. Her latest tweet is: "I've decided not to write the letter but I hope this opens the door for average citizens to voice their opinion & to be
heard! #goingstrong."

She's come a long way from Breaking Dawn.

Brownback, meanwhile, has become a figure of fun; I suspect the Emma Sullivan debacle will appear in his obituaries years hence. But there are Emma
Sullivans all over the country --young people who must make the transition from swooning over vamps to deciding public issues. And far too many of
them are squashed by Brownbackian adults.

With too few exceptions, the officious principals and humorless bureaucrats of the world regard students as blobs with no rights, whose job it is
to shut up and follow orders. Far too many people are willing to go along with this, because much of what teenagers have to say --even when they
are being serious -- is closer to "#heblowsalot" than to "#goingstrong."

But if society doesn't protect their right to silly speech, how many of them will ever have anything serious to say?

The law of student speech was set in 1969 by a case called Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. In that case, students were suspended from school for wearing black armbands to
protest the Vietnam War. The Court memorably wrote that neither "students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or
expression at the schoolhouse gate"and that school officials could not punish speech without showing the likelihood of "substantial disruption of
or material interference with school activities."

But in the years since, conservative majorities have tinkered with Tinker. It seems more and more that, while the First Amendment may
protect silent, dignified "speech" like a black armband, all bets are off if the students speak like, well, students. Consider this message: BONG
HiTS 4 JESUS. Consider a student nominating another student for school office with a speech saying, "I know a man who is firm -- he's firm in his
pants, he's firm in his shirt, his character is firm ... a man who takes his point and pounds it in. ... who will go to the very end -- even
the climax, for each and every one of you." Consider, for that matter, student-newspaper stories on teen pregnancy and divorce. In the years since Tinker, the Court has upheld punishment for all of these "offenses" by high school students.

In the most recent case, Joseph Frederick, a latter-day Jeff Spicoli in
Anchorage, Alaska, unveiled a banner with the thought-provoking "BONG HiTs" legend in front of Juneau-Douglas High School in 2002 just as the
Olympic Torch was being carried past the school. School officials confiscated the banner and suspended him. Morse admitted that he just wanted to
get his silly banner on television. But Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion for the Court, parsed the statement with all the delicate irony of a
HAL-9000 to conclude that it really meant "[Take] bong hits 4 Jesus," or "bong hits [are a good thing]," thus transforming it into a danger
to every student in Juneau: "schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as
encouraging illegal drug use," he wrote. (Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring, wrote separately to suggest that students have no First
Amendment rights at all.)

This Court, as I have written before,
has embraced the doctrine that the First Amendment protects "the thought that we loathe." (While in Topeka, Emma Sullivan was not far from the
Westboro Baptist Church, whose homophobic war-veteran funeral-picketing was quite properly held protected by the Court in 2011 [pdf].) What about the thought that we just think is silly or unwise? It's what
young people often utter; we gag them at peril of damaging the adults they will become.

With the advent of the Internet, schools have begun trying to control their students' speech even off campus, on the grounds that it may
cause disruption on campus if tolerated. A circuit split has developed over this longarm censorship. The Court denied cert. a few weeks ago in a case that upheld
discipline where a student wrote on an off-campus blog that her school officials were "douchebags" for canceling a school music festival, and
encouraged readers "to write something or call her to piss [the principal] off more." Pending is another petition seeking review of a Fourth
Circuit decision that a West Virginia school could discipline a female student who formed a MySpace chatroom devoted to
discussion of the likelihood that another student had genital herpes. The post hurt the victim's feelings, but caused no real disruption at the
school. Nonetheless, a Fourth Circuit panel held that the school could discipline her because it might spur "'copycat' efforts by other
students."

I would think either of the mean and silly utterances at issue would form a suitable subject for a school assembly. That would honor Justice
Brandeis's famous dictum that "[i]f there be time to expose
through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not
enforced silence." I don't see why more speech won't work for students as well as for adults.

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The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.

The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed.

Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. This year, the removal of Lee’s statue in New Orleans has inspired a new round of commentary about Lee, not to mention protests on his behalf by white supremacists.

The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

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Just seven months into his presidency, Trump appears to have achieved a status usually reserved for the final months of a term.

In many ways, the Trump presidency never got off the ground: The president’s legislative agenda is going nowhere, his relations with foreign leaders are frayed, and his approval rating with the American people never enjoyed the honeymoon period most newly elected presidents do. Pundits who are sympathetic toward, or even neutral on, the president keep hoping that the next personnel move—the appointment of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, say, or the long-rumored-but-never-delivered departure of Steve Bannon—will finally get the White House in gear.

But what if they, and many other people, are thinking about it wrong? Maybe the reality is not that the Trump presidency has never gotten started. It’s that he’s already reached his lame-duck period. For most presidents, that comes in the last few months of a term. For Trump, it appears to have arrived early, just a few months into his term. The president did always brag that he was a fast learner.

An analysis of Stormfront forums shows a sometimes sophisticated understanding of the limits of ancestry tests.

The white-nationalist forum Stormfront hosts discussions on a wide range of topics, from politics to guns to The Lord of the Rings. And of particular and enduring interest: genetic ancestry tests. For white nationalists, DNA tests are a way to prove their racial purity. Of course, their results don’t always come back that way. And how white nationalists try to explain away non-European ancestry is rather illuminating of their beliefs.

Two years ago—before Donald Trump was elected president, before white nationalism had become central to the political conversation—Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists then at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to study Stormfront forum posts about genetic ancestry tests. They presented their study at the American Sociological Association meeting this Monday. (A preprint of the paper is now online.) After the events in Charlottesville this week, their research struck a particular chord with the audience.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

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Antifa’s activists say they’re battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?

Since 1907, Portland, Oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.

In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”

Anti-Semitic logic fueled the violence over the weekend, no matter what the president says.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was ostensibly about protecting a statue of Robert E. Lee. It was about asserting the legitimacy of “white culture” and white supremacy, and defending the legacy of the Confederacy.

So why did the demonstrators chant anti-Semitic lines like “Jews will not replace us”?

The demonstration was suffused with anti-black racism, but also with anti-Semitism. Marchers displayed swastikas on banners and shouted slogans like “blood and soil,” a phrase drawn from Nazi ideology. “This city is run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers,” one demonstrator told Vice News’ Elspeth Reeve during their march. As Jews prayed at a local synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, men dressed in fatigues carrying semi-automatic rifles stood across the street, according to the temple’s president. Nazi websites posted a call to burn their building. As a precautionary measure, congregants had removed their Torah scrolls and exited through the back of the building when they were done praying.

If the president is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the white supremacist movements whose growth has fueled its rise.

In his Tuesday press conference, Donald Trump talked at length about what he called “the alt left.” White supremacists, he claimed, weren’t the only people in Charlottesville last weekend that deserved condemnation. “You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he declared. “Nobody wants to say that.”

I can say with great confidence that Trump’s final sentence is untrue. I can do so because the September issue of TheAtlantic contains an essay of mine entitled “The Rise of the Violent Left,” which discusses the very phenomenon that Trump claims “nobody wants” to discuss. Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.

The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.

When did America become untethered from reality?

I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books.